Digital Evangelism Issues

Time is a strange commodity. We recently stayed at a holiday cottage in the north Derbyshire village where I spent some years of my childhood. It’s apparently the oldest building in the village. Friends in the New World will perhaps be particularly entranced by its age – it was already 200 years old when Charles Wesley stayed there! It is part of a farm complex which later became a Moravian settlement for 50 years.

We also visited the neighboring small town where I also lived for some years and went to senior school. In some ways, time has stood still for this small mill town in the hills. Seemingly, it is just too small to be of interest to the big shop chains and franchises (raising the question of ideal community sizes, which I will blog about soon). There are no national pharmacy stores, shoe-shops, MacDonalds, Subway sandwich bars. Not even a supermarket apart from the Coop. Shops are small, independent, family-run. People in the street smile at you, even speak.

The gift from Carnegie

There was the library, unchanged. Construction started exactly 100 years ago, with a generous grant from Carnegie. It is slightly sobering to think that I first started my love affair with books there, as a pre-schooler, more than 50 years ago. At that time, probably even to my parents, it seemed old, a building from a gentler, distant time, separated from the post-war 50s by two traumatic wars and huge social changes. Yet more time has now passed since my childhood, than its age at that time!

When the townspeople started to use their new library in 1910, they were unaware that nearly 1 million British soldiers would die that decade and many more be broken for life. (Incidentally it was only this July that the last two surviving British soldiers from the First War finally died.) The town had seen few cars, fewer telephones, no planes, and lit their houses by gas.

Fast forward to 1950s

By the early 50s, the town had endured two wars (and even one bombing raid), the streets were full of cars, and our new National Health Service was providing free care to all at the point of delivery. Jet bombers with nuclear capability were being built at the nearby Woodford factory, radios were universal, and hundreds of people had already paid out many months’ salary, in cash or installments, on buying a TV to watch the Queen’s Coronation in 1953.

If a 1910 inhabitant could have glimpsed 1953, he would have been bewildered by the technical advances. By contrast, a 1953 resident looking into 2009 would recognize everything (except computers) as mere developments of what she already knew and understood.

Worldviews

But the situation is reversed when we look at worldview changes. The 1910 citizen would still experience a familiar Christian worldview in a time-travel leap to 1953. Church attendance might be slightly smaller – some people’s faith did not survive the trauma of the First War. But even those for whom faith was not a major part of their lives still shared a theistic view of the world and morality. Christians would worship almost identically to their predecessors.

Fast-forward to today. The Christian worldview has vanished. Postmodernism reigns. The change is almost total. The siren call of ‘new lamps for old’ has worked. That time-travelling 1953 resident would feel herself to be in a place where all the signposts had changed. Even her library books would reflect this huge shift.

A change concurrent with the switch to postmodernism has been the transition in media communication cultures. In 1953, TV had barely taken hold – we were still largely in a ‘print communication culture’. Now, we’ve even leapfrogged the ‘broadcast media culture’ to become strongly influenced by our new ‘digital communication culture’. Listen to Shane Hipps (author of Flickering Pixels) explaining this in a 30-minute interview:
Interview with Hipps

1910 evangelism methods would doubtless have worked well enough in 1953. But Christians attempting to share the gospel 1953-style now would meet a wall of incomprehension.

The world has changed for ever. We are effectively in a cross-cultural mission situation, and need to use the insights that the mission world has developed through years of experience. Listen to the three seminars by Mike Frost (given at the UK Evangelical Alliance in 2008), in the left margin. Frost summarizes these issues in his article Translating the Gospel.

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